


Parallels

by Laura Kaye (laurakaye)



Series: Special Topics in the Geometry of Group Actions [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Comfort Sex, Coping, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 14:38:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3533051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurakaye/pseuds/Laura%20Kaye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Espionage is kind of a small world, and it attracts a certain kind of person. </p><p>Or: Clint Barton gets captured, gets rescued, and gets lucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parallels

         Clint hates working without a handler.

         It’s not that he and Natasha aren’t fully capable of carrying out ops by themselves—they’ve done it often enough—but he got spoiled, all those years in SHIELD and especially all those years on Delta. He remembers what it’s like to have the security of a warm, calm voice in your ear, feeding you intel and escape routes and sometimes, just the companionship of someone else’s breathing. Now, he’s not sure whether it would have been better to have never known (so he couldn’t miss it), or whether having that security, that belonging, for any amount of time was worth the pain of losing it. Better to have loved and lost, and all that shit.

         But that’s a different issue, and not especially relevant to the current situation, which is that Clint is currently handcuffed to a chair while a Hydra goon works him over, and he can only hope that Natasha got away clean with the hard drive they were there for and isn’t in a room of her own down the hall.

         They need that intel, is the thing, and it’s only good for a limited time once Hydra figures out it’s been taken, so if things went to shit Clint was to provide the distraction while Natasha got the drive the hell out of there and uploaded the data to JARVIS so the team could scramble to take out the last bases before Hydra got wise and moved them all. It isn’t the best plan they’d ever had, but support infrastructure is thin on the ground lately, and sometimes you just have to make do with what you have.

         Clint had his bell rung pretty good while he was being captured, plus he’s pretty sure that they drugged him with something, because the water they forced down his throat tasted funny and there are some weird halos around all the lights. He’s great at not talking under torture, though, so things are basically fine. Nat will come back for him as soon as she gets the data out, and he can hold on till then.

         He’s giving the interrogator spoilers for the next season of _Dog Cops_ when there’s what sounds like a small explosion and the door comes flying open with a giant hole where the knob used to be, and then the main Hydra goon and the backup Hydra goon and the Hydra goon who was just there to loom menacingly in the corner are getting very efficiently dead. It’s pretty much what he expected, except that the slim figure in the room with him is wearing a suit—not a tac suit like him and Nat, but a _suit_ suit—and dark-rimmed, square glasses, and is wiping off his hands with an actual cloth handkerchief.

         He tries to say something, gurgles, and spits blood out of his mouth, squinting into the blurry light. His heart is thundering from more than just adrenaline and sketchy Hydra drugs. It can’t… it…

         “…Phil?”

 

>>>————> <————<<<

 

         _“…impossible, really. Honestly, you can’t just go adding… on the fly like that!”_

         There are voices, fading in and out.

         _“They were gonna kill… Plus the drive was already gone and… dead, don’t you think the bloke they were beating for information might… about how that happened?”_

         Loud. Clint’s head hurts.

         _“He could be a turncoat! He could be a rival terrorist! He could… terrible idea to bring back to the safehouse!”_

         Clint’s eyes don’t want to open.

_“Or he could be a good guy, trying to stop… on our fucking side!”_

         Honestly, he really just wants to sleep some more.

         _“… at the nearest hospital and go about your business, don’t… back with you…”_

         If Harry and Hermione would just stop shouting for a minute.

         _“…it were one of us. If— if_ Harry _—”_

         He goes to sleep again.

 

>>>————> <————<<<

 

         The next time Clint wakes up, he’s a lot more coherent. His inventory of his situation informs him that:

1)    He’s still tied up

2)    At least he’s tied up to a bed this time

3)    Unlike certain other times he’s woken up tied to a bed, he appears to be fully clothed

4)    He’s pretty sure he’s been given some medical care and/or painkillers

5)    There’s someone in the room with him, he can feel their creepy staring prickling on the side of his face.

         All in all, it seems like there’s not much to be gained by playing possum, so he opens his eyes.

         There’s a young woman sitting next to the bed, well out of arm’s reach even if his arms weren’t tied, watching him. She’s wearing hipster glasses, a neat, tailored skirt suit, and—at Clint’s best guess—three knives and a gun. When he meets her eyes, she tilts her head in a polite nod.

         “Feeling better?” she asks, crisp, cool English accent, and oh, it’s Hermione. He dimly remembers hearing her arguing over whether to keep him or dump him somewhere, and wonders if the current situation means she won or lost.

         “I only see one of you, so that’s an improvement,” he says.

         “Good,” she says. “I hate to interrogate drugged people; hallucinations make the intelligence very unreliable.”

         Ah. So it _is_ that sort of tied-to-a-bed scenario.

         “When your friend busted in, I was telling Hydra about Dog Cops,” he says, affecting his best deadpan and trying not to think too much about what he thought, just for a moment, when her friend in the suit—who must be Harry—came through the door. “Are you caught up on season three?”

         “Or you could tell me who you are. Our normal identification resources have been surprisingly ineffective.”

         “Would you believe I’m an innocent bystander?”

         “In my experience, innocent bystanders are rarely impossible to identify via facial recognition.”

         He wants to make some kind of quip about how much experience someone who looks twenty-five at most could possibly have, but he thinks of Natasha and bites his tongue. He shrugs—as best he can while his arms are tied to a bed, anyway—and blesses Tony Stark’s paranoia and JARVIS’ protectiveness for scrubbing his digital trail after the Leak. Harry and Hermione haven’t killed him and seem to have treated his injuries, which is a point in the “not evil” column, but evil people don’t always make sense (witness recent events and Richmond motherfucking Valentine, whose resemblance to Director Fury Clint is _never laughing at again_ ), so he’s not ready to give them much even though he’s not planning to fight his way out just yet.

         Hermione leans forward, her eyes sharp, and it actually kind of makes him homesick for Natasha. “Let’s not play these silly games,” she says. “Tell me what you did with the drive.”

         “What drive?” he asks, putting on the expression Natasha refers to as “Barton’s deficient sheep face.”

         She raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. Oh, Nat would _like_ her. Clint hopes she isn’t evil.

         “Yeah, well, I had to try,” he says. “Look at it from my perspective; I don’t know who you are either, and I’m the one tied up. Plus, I have a pretty bad history with people with British accents taking me captive. It’s a thing.”

         She regards him thoughtfully, but before she says anything else the door slams open and a young man nearly falls through it.

         “We’ve got him!” he says, eyes darting from Hermione to Clint and back again. His face is flushed with excitement, eyes bright; if it weren’t for the obvious strength lying underneath his tailored suit coat and the coiled physicality in his movements, he’d look impossibly young for (apparently) a spy.

         This must be Harry, then. Good. If Clint’s memory serves (admittedly a big if), he’s the one who insisted on rescuing Clint in the first place.

         “What do you mean, you’ve got him?” Hermione turns her head sharply, sleek blonde ponytail whipping behind her.

         “I knew he looked familiar! I had Merlin re-run the trace with the New York footage, and I was _right,_ R—Lancelot.” He gestures at Clint’s bed, like, _tah-dah!_ “He’s an _Avenger._ ”

         Merlin? Lancelot? Clint has to laugh. No wonder, no _wonder_ he’d thought— “And you two are Kingsmen. Kingsmans? I never got the hang of the plural.” They’d run into Kingsmen occasionally, over the years. They were weirdos, but it was a good weird, mostly. Phil had been spy buddies with one of them, at least if you can be said to be buddies with someone when you only know each others’ code names.

         Hermione—Lancelot, apparently—stiffens. “What do you know,” she demands.

         “Relax, we’re on the same side,” Clint says, and gives one last shimmy then sits up, shaking the ropes off his wrists. “Tell your handler to run the name Hawkeye.”

         It takes a few seconds before she moves her hand away from the thigh holster she’s wearing, so she’s obviously got a live connection. Induction speakers in the glasses, probably, since Harry’s wearing the same ones and Clint’s pretty sure that Phil’s buddy had, too.

         “So while we’re all becoming friends, you wanna tell me your names? I can’t keep calling you Hermione and Harry in my head.”

         Harry _flinches_ , and Hermione shoots him a poisonous look. He actually holds up his hands, palm out. “Hey, hey, sorry!” he says. “I don’t know what I said, but I didn’t mean it whatever way you took it, honest. I just meant, like, Harry Potter? Because of the accents. That’s all.”

         She watches him for a moment, and that gimlet stare makes him want to duck his head and fidget. Nat will _love_ her. Finally, she seems to make a decision.

         “You may call me Lancelot,” she says. “And my colleague is Galahad.”

         “What? No, he’s not,” Clint blurts. “Dammit. I mean. Sorry. Do you have duplicate code names or something? Because I’ve met Galahad, and I’m pretty sure he’s like fifty by now.” And now he feels even worse, because this Galahad looks _wrecked_ , and he’s pretty sure that Herm—Lancelot—is going to feed him his own tongue in about another minute.

         “What—” young Galahad’s voice is uneven, but he’s obviously trying to hold it together. His accent is a little rougher than Lancelot’s. “What did he look like? The Galahad you met.”

         “White man, six-two, maybe one-eighty? Brown eyes, dark wavy hair, fit build. Looked rich, but not an asshole about it. Mean as a snake in hand-to-hand, though.”

         Galahad looks away. “Yeah. That was him.”

         Was? Aw, no. Way to go, Barton. “Oh, man, I’m sorry.”

         “He was a hero,” Lancelot says. She’s not talking to Clint. “He got us the intel we needed to stop Valentine.” 

         Galahad doesn’t look like that helps much. Clint feels him on that one. In their line of work, pretty much everyone dies a hero, and it never makes it hurt any less.

         “How did you know him?” Galahad asks Clint.

         “It was about ten years ago,” Clint says. “My partner and I were on a mission that went bad. We got taken, things were looking pretty grim. Then right before we started losing toes, our handler came crashing in with this English guy none of us had ever seen before. They killed like sixteen guys between them, got us out _and_ the information we’d come for. They took us back to the safehouse and Galahad honest-to-God made everybody tea.” He has to stop and clear his throat at the memory; the warmth of the cup soaking into his sore hands, Phil geeking out adorably over Galahad’s spy gadgets. “We kept everything at codename level, because spies. But I’m pretty sure Phil—my handler—kept in touch.”

         “That sounds like him,” Galahad says, voice a little thick. “Swooping in to the rescue like some sort of bloody posh superhero.”

         “I still don’t know whether that was the first time Phil met him or whether they’d known each other before somehow,” Clint says, and if his voice is a little wistful, hell, it’s not like these kids know him.

         “You could ask him,” Galahad says. “Harry—that was his name, his real one I mean—he doesn’t exactly need operational security anymore.”

         Clint slumps. “No,” he says quietly. “I can’t.”

         “Oh.” Galahad sits on the edge of the bed, looking sidelong at Clint out of the corners of his eyes. “Sorry, mate. V-Day?”

         It’s a reasonable assumption. People in their line of work didn’t come out of V-Day very well; too easy to kill a lot of people in four minutes if you were habitually armed and trained to fight. However, thanks to whatever kind power of the universe was responsible for Tony’s ironclad rivalry with Valentine and subsequent insistence on providing his friends with Stark sim cards, the Avengers and their associates had mostly made it out okay.

         Clint shakes his head. “New York.”  He draws an unsteady breath. “Stabbed in the back.”

         “Mine was shot in the head.”

         “Quick, at least.”

         Galahad snorts. “Yeah.”

         They’re silent for a moment, then Galahad shakes his head and straightens, turning toward Clint. Clint pretends not to notice that his eyes are red. He’s pretty sure Galahad is doing him the same favor.

         “You can call me Eggsy,” Galahad says, and holds out his hand to shake. Behind them, Lancelot makes an infuriated little noise.

         “Clint.” He shakes. The kid has interesting callouses. Not just guns, Clint thinks. Parallel bars or something, maybe. He’s got the build for it.

         There’s the sound of a distant explosion. Lancelot and Eggsy both leap to their feet, hands going to holsters.

         “…and that’s probably my partner,” Clint says. He starts toward the door, but the kids try to block him. “Maybe you should let me go first,” he suggests. “She doesn’t like it when I’m taken hostage.”

         “Oi, we rescued you!” Eggsy protests.

         “Potato, potahto,” Clint says, and Natasha bursts through the door.

 

>>>————> <————<<<

 

         The safe house gets a little bit broken and they all have to move to a hotel. Fortunately, nobody gets shot, and that’s really all Clint wants to say about that.

 

>>>————> <————<<<

        

         After everybody settles down and background-checks each other and determines that nobody is evil, and after they put Maria in touch with Merlin (hah, and people think _Hawkeye_ is a dumb code name!) to work out an information-sharing agreement that will allow everyone to get their shit done, Nat and Clint and Eggsy and Lancelot, who he is reluctantly informed is named Roxy, all go out for drinks.

         Well, Clint and Eggsy go out for drinks. Natasha and Roxy appear to be comparing notes on various bits of spycraft that are useful for an attractive woman in a club. It’s beautiful to watch; they’ve stolen the same dude’s wallet six times, practicing planting and lifting. The dude has no idea, and appears to think he’s the luckiest bastard on earth. It’s understandable, really.

         Clint _knew_ Nat would like her.

         Eggsy’s changed out of the suit (which is apparently _bulletproof,_ and Clint aches with how much Phil would have lost his shit over that) and into jeans and a soft green sweater that Clint would bet are still ridiculously expensive. He’s curious about Eggsy; Roxy seems comfortable with all her fancy trappings, but he can see Eggsy paying a little too much attention to his clothes, adjusting things too often, touching his cufflinks like he’s worried they’ve fallen off. Plus, it’s not like Clint knows a lot about British culture, but he knows when he watches BBC America or whatever the characters who talk like Roxy are rich people and the characters who talk like Eggsy are gang members. It hints at a story, and Clint’s gut says that story’s going to be a familiar one.

         “So,” he says, toasting Eggsy with his beer. “How’d you hook up with the suit brigade?”

         “You won’t believe it.” Eggsy shakes his head, draining about half his drink in one pull. “I ain’t exactly their typical recruitment story.”

         “Try me,” Clint says. “Can’t be any stranger than mine.”

         “Maybe we can swap, yeah? Story for a story?”

         Clint nods. “Make it good; mine involves evil circus performers.”

         Eggsy laughs, dimples flashing. “Well, in _that_ case.” He folds his hands on the table, taking a deep breath, and starts talking.

         If Clint didn’t know better, he’d assume this was some sort of setup—and a clumsy setup at that, with too many elements in common with Clint’s life not to be suspicious. But Natasha had been satisfied, in the end, and that means that fate is really capricious enough that there’s another guy with a shitty home life who was misusing his talents until a suave motherfucker in a nice suit pulled him out of jail and told him that he could be _better,_ and _meant_ it.

         Clint had liked Galahad the agent, but Eggsy isn’t talking about Galahad; he’s talking about Harry Hart, a person Clint never met, and the way Eggsy talks about Harry makes Clint ache. He wonders if he was ever this painfully young, if his eyes lit up like this, if he constantly compared everything in his life to the way Phil ate, spoke, fought, used a gun, wore a tie.

         Well. Truth be told, he still kind of does that. He just hides it better now. He hates the pity he gets from people who don’t understand.

         Eggsy, though. Eggsy understands, maybe better than anyone but Tasha ever will, and so Clint buys them each a couple more beers, and he meets Eggsy’s wide hazel eyes, and he tells him about Phil.

         It’s hard at first, but the more he talks the more he _wants_ to talk, because Eggsy appreciates things like marksmanship and the practical application of gymnastics in the field and possibly falling maybe a little bit completely in love with your badass mentor and going through your days determined to impress him and then losing him and losing your shit and then trying to pick up the pieces afterward.

         They close the place down, and Nat and Roxy walk them back to the hotel like elegant and skeptical sheepdogs, making sure they’re actually in the elevator before heading back out on some mysterious errand of their own.

         He’s a little buzzed, but nowhere near drunk; the fizzing exhilaration he’s feeling isn’t from alcohol but from the sheer relief of talking about everything with someone who gets it, and when Eggsy pauses in the doorway of his hotel room, obviously reluctant to part, he thinks he’s feeling it too.

         “We could, um,” Clint says, raising what he hopes is a significant eyebrow at the bed, and Eggsy swears and lunges at him like a strangely muscular octopus, all grabby hands and clumsy kisses, and they manhandle each other inside the room and shut the door.

         Sex with Eggsy is fun, greedy and acrobatic and generous and oddly sweet, and if they’re both half thinking of somebody else, well, it’s a relief not to have to pretend to be doing anything different. Clint turns a little more demanding than he usually is, manhandles Eggsy a little more just to enjoy the way he melts into it. They try absurd positions that make Clint think he’s going to pull a hamstring but somehow end up feeling amazing. Eggsy comes three times, the gift of the twenties, but Clint’s got experience on his side and makes the most of his turn too. They laugh a lot, from the dopamine rush or maybe catharsis, and when they finally run out of steam they collapse in a cuddle pile under the one sheet left on the bed.

         When they finally wake up the next morning, Clint realizes that they broke the lamp and knocked a picture off the wall.

         _So_ worth it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> In the next installment: two dead spies ponder life, love, and second chances.


End file.
